Characteristics of a Novel Lower Hybrid Wave Antenna for the TST-2 Spherical Tokamak

A new type of traveling wave antenna which excites the lower hybrid wave directly was developed. This antenna is similar to the inductively-coupled combline antenna in that only the first element of the antenna array is excited externally, and subsequent elements are excited passively by mutual coupling between adjacent elements. The main difference is that whereas the inductively-coupled combline antenna makes use of mutual inductance, the presently proposed antenna makes use of mutual capacitance. The radiating elements are located at the voltage maximum, and the electric field induced in the plasma is in the toroidal direction rather than the poloidal direction, matching the polarization of the lower hybrid wave. Optimization studies were carried out to obtain a band-pass characteristic centered around 200 MHz, and a unidirectional wavenumber spectrum with the parallel index of refraction corresponding to approximately 5. Plasma current ramp-up to 2 kA has been achieved on the TST-2 spherical tokamak with 12 kW of RF power at 200 MHz during the initial experimental period using this antenna. Further optimization studies are being performed.